Asus Eee line gets NVIDIA’s Ion

Asus and NVIDIA have just announced that several new models of the award-winning Asus Eee line are shipping with NVIDIA’s Ion chipset (the same one used in the Macbook Pro). The new products include:

• Eee PC 1201N: Ion + dual-core CPU (Atom) netbook
• EeeTop PC EB1012: All-in-one 20″ with touch screen and DVD
• EeeBox PC EB 1012: Nettop that is HD video capable
• EeeBox PC EB1501: A more powerful box with 4GB of memory and Windows 7 Home Premium
• AT3N7A-I: A mini-ITX motherboard for home theater PCs

With the upcoming Flash 10.1 (final release), Ion will be extremely potent, not only for hardware-accelerated DVD or Blu-Ray playback (it has been since day 1), but also for playing fullscreen Flash videos from sites like Hulu or YouTube, which are quickly becoming critical to a Media Center experience. This is a major design-win for NVIDIA.